Courtesy of Steven Spielberg and, well, pretty much everybody.
Oblig Region-of-Birth-Loyalty Post
I don’t pay much — well, all right, any — attention to baseball. In practice, this means for example that in the photograph at the left, if you masked the team names and logos, for all I knew I’d be looking at… gee, what are those other teams with red in their uniforms? Cardinals? (I hear they’re not in St. Louis anymore, right?) Red Sox? Braves? (Uh… Milwaukee? Atlanta? When did that happen?)
They are, of course, none of those other teams. They are the Philadelphia Phillies, 2008 last-game-of-World-Series edition.
Not only the city of Philadelphia itself, but within a wide circle around William Penn’s statue atop City Hall — into other areas of Pennsylvania, probably Delaware and Maryland — there is much rejoicing. Including South Jersey, my ancestral (and until 1990 or so, my real) home.
As of several weeks ago, I had a vague sense that the team was involved in something-or-other in the postseason. So I’m pretty embarrassed. (Well, not really. Just help me out here wouldja, I’m trying to save face.)
Here’s what a message from one of my siblings said, at 10:42 last night. (I myself had been asleep for an hour by then.)
THE PHILLIES WON!!!! OH MY GOD! Mom’s probably havin’ to have her heart checked! Can you believe it!!!
(I didn’t even know our mother ever even watched baseball, let alone to the point of rooting for someone. Football, heck yeah. But baseball?)
And then we have the following. This is from a nephew, recently transplanted from the East Coast to the West. The title over this blog post (time-stamped 12:40 this morning, presumably Pacific time and not Eastern) is, “And Nearly Three Decades Later…”:
BAM! The Philadelphia Phillies are 2008 World Champions! Neither rain nor snow nor Bud Selig nor Joe Buck could stop the most efficient and charismatic team in baseball from claiming what was rightfully theirs. 28 years in the making, goddamn… CONGRATULATIONS, PHILLIES!!
More to come in the sober – but still glorious, because THE PHILLIES WON THE WORLD SERIES – morning. See you then!
I don’t know. Maybe I — or they — have some sort of rare mutant recessive gene.
The Flames. The Smoke. The Highway. The Terror.
[Today’s post is my contribution to travel writer Angela Nickerson‘s Blogapalooza blog party. The theme of Angela’s Halloween Blogapalooza is “What a Strange Trip It’s Been,” for which her instructions are:
…put a photo of a pumpkin at the top of your post and tell us the story of your strangest or scariest trip ever.
Be sure to visit Angela’s site and explore the other participants’ pages, listed in the right-hand menu under “Blogs-a-Palooza-ing on October 29.” And keep your eyes open for blog posts today headed with the blog party’s signature pumpkin — even if they’re not listed on Angela’s site.]
It was the year of the wildfires.
Everywhere in Florida and south Georgia the forests burned, blazes started by God, Nature, human accident or intent. In the quiet of the nights, even from dozens of miles away, you could hear the distant roar of the flames, the whir of the helicopter blades, the shouts and screams of the firemen. The smell of smoke clung to every surface.
The Man and The Woman did not know in advance that this would be a time of fire from which they might need to escape. They had planned in advance not an escape, but a simple weekend trip. A celebration. An anniversary.
It was early June, 2007.
The trip itself had been pleasant, uneventfully pleasant. Fun. Their destination was a charming old harbor city in the Deep South. The Man and The Woman had eaten their fill on more than one night; they had toured the old river plantations nearby; they saw the headlines about the wildfires, but the fire and smoke and ash were too far distant to concern them. They were on vacation. Nothing could frighten them on vacation. Nothing could harm them.
Oh, there were signs that things were not normal. There was the evening walking tour of the old cemeteries, during which ghostly lights bobbed and flickered above the ground until you looked directly at them. There were the scraps of conversation overheard at nearby restaurant tables, from behind the hotel’s front desk: Interstate… still burning… shut down… no end…
But nothing could harm The Man and The Woman. The trip had been a success. They were untouchable. They were loading up their luggage; they were setting forth on the trip home.
Placeholder Post: Defeating the Aliens
[Working today on tomorrow’s post — my contribution to tomorrow’s Halloween Blogapalooza blog party, hosted by travel writer Angela Nickerson.
In the meantime, I thought you might find this useful. For, y’know, when They land and we have to, like, fight our way out of impending intergalactic apocalypse and stuff. Dude, these people know.]
Has John Cusack Ever Made a Bad Movie?
Kidding. Sort of.
I mean, look, the guy’s made almost 60 movies, in a career spanning more than 25 years (per his Wikipedia filmography, at least). It’s pretty much impossible to make that many films and have nary a stinker in the bunch.
Granted, I haven’t seen all or even most of those five dozen films. (Which surprised me, actually; I’d been prepared to open this post by flashing my Cusack credentials, daring anyone to challenge me.)
But I’ve seen a lot of them. And I honestly cannot think of a single film, even the ones he hasn’t “starred” in, which he has not boosted by a sly, assured performance.
Lord knows, there’s nothing conventionally movie-star about his looks — his soulful-hangdog looks (like in the above photo) or (as at left) his crazy looks or (as below right) affable, laughing, and apparently relaxed. (I’ve never seen Rachael Ray’s talk show, but I’ve seen her manic 30-Minute Meals routine. It’s hard to imagine anyone could ever really be relaxed around that person, but I remain open to the possibilities of an infinite universe.)
And Lord knows, in one of his profession’s true injustices, he doesn’t have shelves full of acting awards.
But damn, the guy is a pleasure to see on the screen.
Software I’d Like to See: Fotōpic
It makes no difference that I’ve been a computer programmer for nearly 30 years now. There are computer programmers and there are computer programmers. If your assignments (actual or potential) don’t require you to use a given technology, chances are you’ll never learn that technology. Meanwhile, the world passes you by in the form of all the folks (generally younger) who can make the technology sing.
Still, it’s nice to fantasize about the sort of project you’d like to work on, someday, if you only knew enough…
In Merry-Go-Round, I did this with a few wholly imaginary (as far as I know) pieces of software. Of these, the one I like the most is called Fotōpic. In the passage which follows, Fotōpic’s general nature is explained, and one character is shown using it.
Background: The character in this passage, Abbie, is on a mission on behalf of an underground/resistance movement which goes by the name of ACME Universal. Her mission: travel by train one night to the (fictional) town of Jessup’s Cut, Maryland, where she will make contact with a man whose description she knows, but whom she has never met.
There’s one problem: Abbie needs to get to Jessup’s Cut, make the contact, and get out of Jessup’s Cut as fast as possible. But she’s never been there, and she can’t go in advance. How’s she going to navigate her way around a town’s building, trees, streets, street lamps, obstacles which a GPS unit or satellite photos won’t help her with?
Here goes. From Merry-Go-Round:
As Good as Jesus in a Slice of Toast
From the New York Daily News:
Elephant-shaped Ganesh growth cured my ills, Queens man says
To most people, the purple flower that sprouted between two concrete slabs in a Queens backyard would be just a hardy vestige of summer.
Sam Lal sees something more.
The Jamaica [neighborhood in Queens] man is convinced the mysterious blossom is an incarnation of the elephant-headed Hindu god Ganesh — and neighbors and friends are flocking to see it.
…
Lal believes the flower’s position — growing through concrete, facing a garage he converted to a prayer space — is evidence of a connection to Ganesh, revered as the Remover of Obstacles.
(Be sure to see the sidebar photo gallery, too. Capsule summary: “The Virgin Mary in a Funyun? ‘Allah’ in an eggplant? Pope John Paul II in a bonfire? Check out more sightings.” And yes, it really does put Allah’s name in quotation marks.)
What is it that drives people to see their god-figures in everyday objects?
I want to read a story set in ancient Greece or Rome — or India, for that matter — a time when people’s daily lives were ruled by a hundred gods all at once, tinkering concurrently with a hundred different human preoccupations.
It must have been dizzying walking through a street marketplace. Every time a vendor seeking buyers held up a bolt of fabric, a rock, a zucchini or kumquat, a hand-hammered item of metal dinnerware, a leather pouch or wineskin, a handful of rice or spices pouring through his fingers, anything: a gods-sensitive individual must have wanted to drop to his or her knees a dozen times, trembling with gratitude or fear, never knowing if the everyday world was about to end or wobble on its axis, or if his bad back would be healed, or her eyes struck blind…
Or is this really as strange as a cynic might insist? What about a world in a grain of sand, heaven in a wild flower? Why should we think of William Blake as a mystic, and Sam Lal as a mere crackpot?
(News article courtesy of a commenter on Ursula Vernon’s Bark Like a Fish, Damnit! Livejournal. Early on, Ganesh figured prominently in Vernon’s webcomic, Digger. See, e.g., this strip et seq.)
Squirrels in the Attic
It seems like æons ago that I lived in rural New Jersey. It was without question, as the saying goes, a former life — different employer, different house, different spouse. (To distinguish her from The Missus, I will refer to her as The Former Missus.)
Our house was situated next to a dairy farm; our municipality, a couple of centuries old, was called Tewksbury Township. Across the road from us was a big old Victorian, a former farmhouse (although the property by then was too small to do any farming on) which still had a barn in the backyard. In the barn lived a horse and a cow which, as one of our neighbors said, “seemed to be quite sympatico.”
The house itself was what was called an “expanded Cape Cod.” White wooden clapboard siding; black shutters on either side of the windows. Only the first floor was finished, but there was an attic.
An attic in which a complete family of squirrels lived.
Beacon
[In the wake of yesterday’s post (which began as a study of someone else’s neurosis but ended as a study of my own), I’m really feeling the need today to just write about something completely free (for me) of any, y’know, import. Here’s what floated to the surface, as it were.]
A while back, I participated in one of those “blog parties” which seem to come along periodically. The topic (selected by the party’s organizer, Rebecca Ramsey) was Wonders of the World, in which participants celebrated, well, wonderful things or occasions which held some special appeal for them.
My topic was waterfalls. As I explained in an aside there, for some unknown reason I’ve been fascinated by the country of Wales, which I’ve never visited. (Nor, as far as I know, has anyone I know ever visited there.) (Okay, you can all announce yourselves now.) Although I’m not actively looking for information on the Welsh language, Welsh countryside, Welsh history or folklore, whatever, my mind still goes into heightened-interest mode when I come across any of that stuff.
The lighthouse shown here has not been operational for some time. It’s referred to as the Whitford (or alternatively Whiteford) lighthouse. Built in 1866 to replace the original (which was in turn erected in 1854), it was deactivated in 1926. It’s 130 feet high, made of cast iron, and at low tide — as shown here — requires a five-mile walk to reach. The Whitford lighthouse watches over the Burry Inlet, on the southern coast of Wales.
The Thing That Happened, Once
From whiskey river:
At Blackwater Pond
At Blackwater Pond the tossed waters have
settled
after a night of rain.
I dip my cupped hands. I drink
a long time. It tastes
like stone, leaves, fire. It falls cold
into my body, waking the bones. I hear them
deep inside me, whispering
oh what is that beautiful thing
that just happened?
(Mary Oliver)
And:
In the tea ceremony, the expression “once in a lifetime, this one encounter” is often used. The usual way this is interpreted is “a one-and-only encounter.” In Zen, though, we interpret this expression in the following way: In the course of our lifetime, there is one person we must meet. No matter through which grasslands we may walk or which mountains we may climb, we must meet this person. This person is in this world. Who is this person? It is the true self. You must meet the true self. As long as you don’t, it will not be possible to be truly satisfied in the depths of your heart. You will never lose the sense that something is lacking. Nor will you be able to clarify the way things are.
This is the objective of life as well as of the teaching of Buddhism — to meet yourself.
(Sekkei Harada)
And the obvious musical bit (lyrics follow), although the video is a bit… unusual:
Once in a Lifetime
(words and music by Talking Heads;
performance is emphatically not)And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack
And you may find yourself in another part of the world
And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house,
with a beautiful wife
And you may ask yourself: Well… how did I get here?Letting the days go by/Let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by/Water flowing underground
Into the blue again/After the money’s gone
Once in a lifetime/Water flowing underground.And you may ask yourself
How do I work this?
And you may ask yourself
Where is that large automobile?
And you may tell yourself
This is not my beautiful house!
And you may tell yourself
This is not my beautiful wife!Letting the days go by/Let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by/Water flowing underground
Into the blue again/After the money’s gone
Once in a lifetime/Water flowing underground.Same as it ever was… same as it ever was …same as it ever was…
Same as it ever was… same as it ever was… same as it ever was…
Same as it ever was… same as it ever was…
(Followed by Statler and Waldorf: “Same as it ever was! Same as it ever was! Yeah—” “An hour ago!” [laughter])
Original, longer version, from the concert film Stop Making Sense, can be viewed here.
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